TaPRA Research Prize for Editing (Essay Collections and Special Issues)

This prize is for an edited collection (a book of essays or a special issue of a journal) that defines new approaches in research in theatre and performance, opening up new areas of work and new lines of enquiry.

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PRIZES

2023

WINNER

Amy Mihyang Ginther

Stages of Reckoning: Antiracist and Decolonial Actor Training. London: Routledge, 2022.

It is with great joy that we announce Stages of Reckoning Antiracist and Decolonial Actor Training as the winner of the TaPRA Prize for Edited Collections. This is a joyous, urgent and heartfelt book which invites the reader in with care offering a challenge and a call to take action. It is a sensitively curated collection, which carefully situates and critiques actor training within existing hegemonies of whiteness and coloniality. It creates a space in which a conversation about the needs of Global Majority acting students are placed at the centre. It names and acknowledges the additional labour, effort and work required by these students and questions and challenges this experience. The book offers exciting and challenging discussions and considerations of pedagogy for the field as a whole. In particular we wish to commend the editor for their considered acts of editorial care and support extended to the contributors, placing special consideration to the writing conditions of the contributors. This book epitomises the TaPRA manifesto.

SHORTLISTED

Julia Listengarten and Yana Meerzo

Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation. London: Bloomsbury, 2021

Martin Middeke and Martin Riedelsheimer

Critical Theatre Ecologies special issue, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 10.1 (2022)

WINNING

The Prize

TBC

2022

WINNER

Melissa Blanco Borelli, Bryce Lease and Royona Mitra

for “Outing Archives/Archive Outings”, special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review, 31:1–2 

RUNNERS-UP

Dassia N. Posner, Kevin Bartig and Maria De Simone 

Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev, Indiana University Press, 2021

SHORTLISTED

Clare Parfitt

Cultural Memory and Popular Dance: Dancing to remember, dancing to forget (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) 

2021

WINNER

Theron Schmidt

for Agency: A Partial History of Live Art (University of Chicago Press, 2019)

The judging panel agreed that Agency: A Partial History of Live Art is an elegant and beautifully presented mapping of important themes and topics in Live Art. The lens of agency provides an original perspective as well as providing a well-deserved tribute to the work of the Live Art Development Agency. The editorial strategy for the volume is very clearly articulated and the variety of voices and registers was extremely well curated and framed.  The work is very precisely edited with an excellent introduction to each sub-section. All the elements, including the images, are effectively integrated in a coherent totality.

SHORTLISTED

Siân Adiseshiah and Jaqueline Bolton

debbie tucker green: Critical Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

Katie Beswick

Housing, Performance and Activism (Studies in Theatre and Performance, 2020, 40:1)

Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson

The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography (Methuen Drama, 2019)

2019

WINNER

Richard Gough

for Performance Research 24(3), On Reflection: Turning 100

Both the shortlisting panel and the final judging panel found this special issue of PR a monumental achievement. The judges commended the ambition and innovation of its concept: to commission an original essay on each of the themes chosen for each of 100 special issues of the journal. This framework produced a fascinating set of essays that were often formally innovative and conceptually rich. Excellence in editing is shown not only by the management of such an enormous project, but also in the layers of a plurality of inter-generational voices speaking to the edited work of the journal itself. The result is an encyclopaedic but creatively anarchic view of the field. Like the issue itself, theatre and performance studies is revealed to be interesting, odd, motile, dynamic, and plural. On Reflection: Turning 100 is less a guide to theatre and performance studies than a wander, and thus opens new possibilities for editorial practice.

SHORTLISTED

Geraldine Brodie and Emma Cole

Adapting Translation for the Stage (Routledge, 2017)

Kate Dorney and Maggie Gale

Vivien Leigh: Actress and Icon (Manchester University Press, 2017)

Scott Palmer and Joslin McKinney

Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design (Bloomsbury, 2017)

2017

WINNER

Maria Delgado & Joanne Tompkins

for Contemporary Theatre Review: The Politics, Processes and Practices of Editing: special edition. 25:1, February 2015.

The collection notes the relative invisibility of the labour of editing, and goes a long way to bring, in the words of the sub-title, the politics, processes and practices of editing into the light. The introduction effectively maps debates and issues, arguing for editing, in all its many forms, as one of the main ways in which academic disciplines mark where they are and chart a path to the future: as one of the sub-headings has it, it is about ‘The value of editing/ [as well as] the editing of value’, and as such it is a timely and welcome contribution to ongoing debates in the discipline about the value of editing to our research culture.

SHORTLISTED

Helen Nicholson & Anna Harpin

for Performance and Participation: Practices, Audiences, Politics (Palgrave, 2016)

Alyson Campbell & Stephen Farrier

for Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives On Where Performance Leads Queer (Palgrave, 2016)

MAKE A

Nomination

Only current TaPRA members can submit nominations for our awards or elections. Each nomination requires a seconder, who must also be a current member.

TaPRA 2025 at Warwick

Our 2024 conference will be hosted in partnership with the University of Warwick, 27-29 August 2025

TaPRA 2025 at Warwick

Our 2024 conference will be hosted in partnership with the University of Warwick.

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